spoiling the surprise...,
2009-11-27 15:27:46
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you know what grows on shrubs?...,
2009-12-01 17:38:07
the CRU hack demonstrates that the skeptics are hacks:
I don't remember any singular event that has done more to convince me that global warming skeptics are a bunch of illiterate and/or dishonest buffoons who are incapable of checking google before firing off FOIA requests. I mean, there was that movie they made that arbitrarily and without explanation carved off 20 years of the temperature record in a graph falsely labeled "1880 and 2000" in the process of replicating Stanley Jevons' unfinished work of blaming everything under the sun on sunpots, but whatever, the graphics department didn't get the memo.
The decline being hidden is the tree ring proxy data since 1960 because of the super-secret conspiracy on the part of climate scientists that you can read about on wikipedia. The instrumental record and tree rings from Europe correlate prior to 1960, and diverge after 1960 for some unclear reasons - acid rain? ozone? global dimming? they won't say! because they don't know yet! - so the eggheads don't use the tree ring data after 1960 when reconstructing historic temperature records from that proxy. It's shocking! Why won't anybody publish anything about it in the literature!?
And then there's the Climate Research thing, where editors stepped down after the publication of Soon & Baliunas 2003, that proves, um, what?
Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. In 2003, Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, complained that paleoclimatologist Hans von Storch was responsible for “the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’” and that they “must get rid of von Storch” (1051190249) as an editor of the journal Climate Research (he indeed subsequently resigned).
An episode Hans von Storch described thusly:
After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28, July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS by Mann and several coauthors. (The problem is not whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century, or if Mann's hockey stick is realistic; the problem is that the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given.) It was not the first time that the process had failed, but it was the most severe case. However, my authority as Editor-in-Chief did obviously not cover the publication of an editorial spelling out the problem. The publisher declined the publication, and I cancelled my task as Editor-in-Chief immediately on 28 July 2003.
Clearly Storch was run out of town by the alarmist mobs. A paper by industry-funded researchers did not disclose "the methodological basis" for its conclusions and made it through some new review process. He sounds like Stephen McIntyre, sans the FOIA requests for their personal email archives and publicly available raw data sets. Demands for openness from private sector skeptics will be followed by gag orders from public sector skeptics.
No doubt further scouring of the hacked archives will also shockingly reveal that scientists are notoriously poor software developers due to the inelegant pragmas of the alarmist, chicken-little FORTRAN language.
